I cover demographic, social and economic trends around the world. I am the R.C. Hobbs Professor of Urban Studies at Chapman University in California and executive editor of newgeography.com. My forthcoming book, The New Class Conflict, will be published by Telos in September.

11/01/2011 @ 12:31PM6,792 views

Political Footballs: L.A.'s Misguided Plans For A Downtown Stadium

Over the past decade Los Angeles has steadily declined. It currently has one of the the highest unemployment rates (roughly 12.5%) in the U.S, and there’s little sign of a sustained recovery. The city and county have become a kind of purgatory for all but the most politically connected businesses, while job creation and population growth lag not only the vibrant Texas cities but even aged competitors such as New York.

Rather than address general business conditions, which sorely need fixing, L.A. Mayor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the other ruling elites have instead focused on revitalizing the city’s urban core, which has done little to boost the region’s overall economy in generations. The most recent example of such foolishness is a $1.5 billion plan to build a football stadium, named Farmers Field, downtown,unanimously approved by the city’s City Council and backed by the city’s “progressive” state delegation.

Like most of the dominant political class, California Senator and former City Council member Alex Padilla cites the sad state of the local economy as justification for approving the plan. But, in reality, it’s hard to find something more profoundly irrelevant than a football stadium.

Indeed years of independent investigations have discovered that urban vanity projects like sports teams and convention centers add little to permanent employment or overall regional economic well-being. As a Minneapolis Fed study revealed, consumers simply shift their expenditures from other activities to the new stadium. Certainly mega-stadiums have done little to boost sad-sack, depopulating cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore or Cleveland.

Commitments to mega-projects tend to further drive urban areas into debt, largely by issuing more bonds that taxpayers are obligated to pay back. One particularly gruesome case can be found in Harrisburg, Pa., whose underwriting of a minor league baseball team helped push the city into bankruptcy. To get the stadium deal, Los Angeles, already over-indebted and suffering a poor credit rating, will issue another $275 million.

Such projects often obscure the real and more complex challenge of nurturing broad-based economic growth. This would require substantive change in a city or regional political culture. Instead the football stadium services two basic political constituencies: large unions and big-time speculators, particularly in the downtown area. The fact that the stadium will be built with union labor, for example, all but guaranteed its approval by the city’s trade union-dominated council.

Downtown developers and “rent-seeking” speculators, the other group behind the project, have siphoned hundreds of millions in tax breaks and public infrastructure in the past decade. They have done so – subsidizing companies from other parts of Los Angeles, entertainment venues and hotels — in the name of a long-held, impossible dream of turning downtown Los Angeles into a mini-Manhattan. Perhaps no company has pushed this more effectively than the stadium developer Anschutz Entertainment Group, a mass developer of generic entertainment districts around the world. AEG has expanded its influence by doling out substantial financial donations to Mayor Villaraigosa and others in the city’s economically clueless political class.

This explains how the stadium was exempted from the state’s draconian anti-greenhouse gas legislation. The city promises that the stadium will be the “most transit-friendly” football stadium in the nation, which strikes locals as absurd. Football crowds tend to be drawn largely from affluent types who don’t live anywhere close to downtown and rarely take public transit to their jobs, much less over the weekend. D.J. Waldie, a leading Los Angeles writer, described the entire project as “cloaked in green snake oil.”

An even more nebulous claim is that downtown needs the investment in order to drive regional growth. To be sure, recent years have seen the growth of a central city restaurant scene, and some 30,000 residents now live in the area compared to closer than 20,000 a decade ago. Yet just outside the immediate, highly-subsidized core, population growth in the surrounding parts of central city over the past decade stood at a mere 0.7%, the lowest rate since the 1950s. The vast majority of the region’s population growth took place in the far-flung regions of the San Fernando Valley.

As an economic engine, downtown LA simply does not warrant the attention, nor the special treatment, that the city’s ruling elites give it. For one thing, it represents a far smaller part of the city’s economy when you compare it to the urban cores of Washington, D.C., or New York City. Indeed, in New York and D.C. roughly 20% of all employment is in the central core; in Los Angeles it’s barely 2.5%.

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Wow, this is perhaps the most uninformed article I’ve ever read about my fair city. Firstly, this stadium will be build with private funds. That requirement is why LA hasn’t have a football team in closing on 20 years. Secondly, the $275 million loan is to finance an expansion of the cash cow convention center which would be undertaken regardless of the stadium. Thirdly, the transit system is already built so no additional expenditures would be required to make this the “most transit-friendly” stadium in America. Lastly, we are uniquely cursed by location. Los Angeles has sever air and water quality issues. Even with our stringent air quality laws, the area still has the worst air in the nation. I’m not sure LA is at all suited to being a manufacturing center at all because of this.

You wrote:”I’m not sure LA is at all suited to being a manufacturing center at all because of this.”

Actually, Los Angeles has long been one of the leading centers of manufacturing in the United States. In 1970, Los Angeles was the second most industrialized city in the United States, after Chicago. There were half a dozen automobile factors (which is why there is Studebaker Street in Long Beach), steel mills, tire factors (Firestone Blvd.), aerospace facilities, oil refineries, and so forth.

Today, Los Angeles is actually the biggest center of manufacturing in the United States. This is a sad and ironic distinction because of the disappearance of manufacturing from the United States. Nonetheless Los Angeles still has a very significant manufacturing base. It is still a major oil refining area, the entertainment business is still a major employer, and there are still plenty of light manufacturing facilities, including the garment industry.

Pr. Kotkin, like most conservative thinkers, disdains the city of Los Angeles because its political leanings are to the left of the Tea Party. The city has not adopted the conservatives agenda of giving any business anything it wants, gutting environmental laws, and driving wages as low as possible. This is the other irony of this story, California in general and southern California in particular, with the most stringent environmental laws in the nation and strong labor protections is among the most largest economies in the world, much less the United States. If California were a country, it would have the eight largest economy in the world. In 2010 the gross state product (GSP) was about 1.9 USD, which is 13% of the United States gross domestic product (GDP).

This is a continuing source of annoyance to those who believe that less regulation and less worker protection is the path to economic prosperity.

It’s really simple…we need to invest in ‘green’ manufacturing. We can kill two birds with one stone. It is no secret that we breath the worst air quality in the nation and we have a local economy to protect. Reducing emissions to protect our health can be done by supporting the use of clean technology to move goods and people. California and specifically areas in LA can be leading manufacturers of this technology. Investment in this type of manufacturing will reduce emissions greatly and create jobs.

I agree with your conclusions but for different reasons. The main reason is that there are already two major football stadiums in the Los Angeles area, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum which is only 2 miles south of the location of the proposed new stadium and is the home venue for the USC Trojans and past home to the Los Angeles Rams and Oakland Raiders. Just 13 miles to the north is the Rose Bowl Stadium, home to the UCLA Bruins and, of course, the Rose Bowl Game. Does Los Angeles really need a third football stadium?

Moreover, the NFL needs Los Angeles much more than Los Angeles needs the NFL. Los Angeles is the second largest market in the US, there is a lot of profits to be made by having an NFL team in Los Angeles. On the other hand, Los Angeles has done just fine without the NFL. This is not to say there are not problems in Los Angeles but none of them would be solved by a football stadium.

Finally, there is a reason there has been no NFL team in Los Angeles for 20 years. Attending an NFL game in person is a really bad deal. The prices are ridiculously high, seating is bad, and the owners treat the fans like dirt. A football in Los Angeles can attend either USC or UCLA games see a pretty good game for a fraction of the discomfort and cost. Further, everyone knows that neither USC nor UCLA will relocate to Tempe at the whim of some owner or because some mayor is willing to prostitute his city to the NFL. Additionally, there are now no “blacked-out” NFL games on television in Los Angeles. There are more games available to be seen exactly because there is no NFL team in the area. Why ruin a perfectly good situation by giving the tax payers hard earned money to some spoiled brat NFL owner?

This stadium hasn’t been exempted from the “green” legislation you are referring to. The stadium is still required to undergo comprehensive environmental review, but no matter what the study finds, they are not required to make any changes to complete the project, only those th city council or other planning agency chooses to require. The only thing that would actually stop its construction might be the discovery of an endangered species habitat. In downtown Los Angeles.

What this stadium DID get is basically fast-tracked through the litigation process that faces many of these projects. Any opponent to the stadium will use lawsuits based on the environmental review to slow down or stop its progress. They can’t sue because it will hurt th envinronment, only on claims the review wasn’t processed correctly, etc. With the new law recently signed by the governor, any project over $150 million will have these cases taken directly to the appeals court, and have shorter deadlines for these lawsuits to be filed. So it will still face the same thought environmental review, it will just get through all the requisite lawsuits more quickly. And it’s not just this stadium – any new project of that magnitude will get th same fast track treatment.

But now don’t even get me started on this misconception about the ports….